Culture and psychic suffering

In his seminal work Civilization and its discontents, Freud links the evolution of culture with man's discomfort in it, mainly because of the loss of happiness due to “the ethical demands of the cultural super-ego” (Freud, 1930, p. 133). He holds that if the aim of life, as revealed by human behavior, is the satisfaction of all desires, the first requisite of culture is the assurance of a law that would put limits to personal gratification as a demand of society. “Man's natural aggressive instinct, the hostility of each against all and of all against each” (ibidem, p. 122), which menaces society with disintegration, is dealt with by its internalization in a part of the self called the superego (Jones 1957). Psyching suffering from relinquishing gratification and from the harshness of the superego, the “pathology of cultural communities”, according to Freud (ibidem, p.143), is the price to be paid for civilization. According to Bion, group culture (as can be, for instance, faith to a group leader or egalitarianism) arises from the conflict between individual needs and a group mentality that expresses a unanimous will, which is in opposition with conscious individual aims (Bion 1961, Bléandonu 1990).

In this way the cultural bond is associated with the uncomfortable acknowledgement of incompleteness and of imperfect protection from lack. But what happens if culture itself endorses the aim of omnipotently gratifying every need? In this volume of International Forum of Psychoanalysis, Raaja Stitou ponders the above question in her article “Psychoanalysis and cultural change: Lacan's contribution and a new perspective”. She holds that modern civilization tries to cover up lack at its root through sophisticated objects which technology offers, while contemporary normative discourses are dominated by the denial of the incompleteness inherent in the human condition. All these can lead to a new kind of psychic suffering, related to the destructiveness this very denial entails